Birkinväskans mening och makt i fyra mediala representationer

Sammanfattning

This bachelor has examined how the birkin bag is represented in the television series Sex and the city and Gilmore girls, the reality show The real housewives of Beverly Hills and in a Youtube video from Kylie Jenner. Therefore this essay's purpose is to identify how the birkin bag is represented and which social interactions are therefore being made through all four videos. This essay also aims to identify how the birkin bag is being portrayed as a symbol marker and to understand how social cultural contexts are experienced. By exploring how the birkin bag is being reflected through symbolic value and power relations. The methodological approach is semiotic image analysis to understand the content in the videos. The second method is discourse analysis to understand the social interactions that occur. The third and final method is text analysis to understand how the source material influences the audience. The continuing part in the essay is a presentation of the theoretical framework consisting of luxury capitalism, symbolic capital and the trickle down theory, that will later be used in the analysing part. The results from the analysing identifies how the birkin bag signify power and meaning by the cultural coded society and represents symbolic worth by using the bag for its uniqueness and exclusivity. Discussing that from the bags limited availability, strategy and price tag in luxury consumption is one point of view on how the birkin bag creates meaning and power. Further on in this essay it is discussed how the birkin bag is interpreted in popular culture and how a bag affects the opportunity to gain status.